Larcency and Lace Part 21

"A sports bar? Why didn't you tell me? I would have dressed down."

"Don't toy with me," Eve said. "You don't know how to dress down, but I'd pay good money to see you try."

At the bar, we were escorted to a table on the deck overlooking Mystic River where Lolique waited.

Was she for real? Between her fluffy name and leopard nails, I half expected her to be wearing a midriff-baring leopard corset and mini skirt with fishnets and thigh-high boots, though I mentally conceded that she wouldn't bring a whip to a restaurant.

I was almost wrong. She wore a yummy, uber-expensive b.u.t.terscotch leather skirt, a black cashmere top with an "oops, my b.o.o.bs fell out" V, and a politically incorrect genuine leopard jacket. She also wore a loose chain twenty-four-karat gold belt-or so it appeared-with a Prada bag and matching shoes I'd die for.

Despite her lack of concern for animal rights, she signed autographs with flair and enthusiasm, her rings, all four, gleaming like they'd come off a pirate ship.

Once we sat at her table, the celebrity hounds backed off. Eve introduced us before we gave our drink orders.

Never having been one for equivocation, subtlety, or small talk, I let Eve take the lead with what Lolique seemed to like most: fan worship, however fake.

Me? I needed to chill before I put the knot in my knickers on the table, metaphorically speaking, of course.

"I must say, Madeira," Lolique purred, "I didn't figure you for a margarita girl but a fine white wine."

"And I spotted you correctly as the dirty Manhattan type."

Lolique raised a brow. "I'm a 'what you see is what you get' kinda girl."

How scary was that, considering what we could see? "Lay it on the table, do you?" I asked.

She winked and called for another, dirtier Manhattan. "Whether people want me to lay it out or not, that's how I made my rep."

"Mind if I lay it on the table, then?"

She nailed a cherry. "I'd find that refreshing."

I leaned forward. "Good. Why did you leave me a fingernail trail, like bread crumbs, to make me come looking for you?"

She chuckled and raised her gla.s.s. "You're a smart one!" She sipped her drink. Slowly. Like she needed time to compose an answer. She set down her gla.s.s. "I wanted to sweet-talk you into letting me do a story about Vintage Magic."

"I was under the impression that you never ask permission, and you already did a column about me."

"Not a gossip column, a real story. We have a lot in common, you and I."

I so did not think so. "Like what?"

"A love for vintage and couture fashion, a love for this town-"

She was a good little liar. Eve b.u.mped my knee with hers. She thought so, too.

"You could have waited to drop off those boxes until I was there so you could ask me straight out. And while we're speaking of vintage couture, the clothes you left are amazing. Thank you doesn't begin to cover it."

"Well, the drinks are on you, then."

I raised my gla.s.s. "On me." I'd have to read between the lines to figure out what the town's biggest celebrity really wanted. "You can do a story about Vintage Magic, right before my grand opening to plug the event."

"Deal." She shook my hand. "When would be a good time for me to come by the shop and talk to you? I don't feel like working tonight. Do you?"

I shook my head, agreeing with her and wondering what her real goal for tonight was. "Tomorrow at noon," I said. "You can pick up some scarecrow clothes."

While checking her vibrating BlackBerry, she looked curiously up at me, so I told her about the contest.

Eve got another beer and I got another margarita.

"I'm jonesing for a cigarette," Lolique said, "because I know I can smoke out here, but I also know how bad secondhand smoke can be, so I won't. I usually only smoke around my husband so I can inherit sooner." She laughed at her own joke.

Eve and I about choked on our drinks.

"I tell him that all the time. He doesn't laugh like he used to." She shrugged.

I recovered first. "How did you and Councilman McDowell meet?"

"We met accidentally on purpose lots of times over the course of a few months before he finally smartened up and decided to rescue me."

"How lucky is he?" I raised my margarita to soften my snark.

"You're right. I'm a catch." She ordered a third and told the waiter to keep 'em coming. "Saw him on TV again tonight, the blowhard. He practiced his playhouse fire speech the night before it burned, you know?"

I set down my drink. Was she trying to frame her husband, or was she planting seeds like a good little gossip columnist? I did not know if I should take this woman seriously or not. "Lolique," I said, "that sounds a bit like an accusation."

"Not really. He's ready for any disaster. h.e.l.l, he's ready to be president of these United States. I just thought the fire speech trumped his usual weird. He didn't like that I caught him at it, either."

I shook my head. "Is this something you should be telling the police?"

"Oh, Lordy, no. If I do that, I'll never inherit the old goat's money. Eve, why are you wearin' the goat's sweater?" Lolique fingered the wrist of Vinney's cardigan.

Eve straightened. "This is my boyfriend's sweater."

"Not if it has a little bitty cigarette burn under the left arm." She accepted a fresh drink.

Eve raised her left arm, and there it was, a little bitty cigarette burn.

"Is he doin' you, too?" Lolique asked, clearly having at least one Manhattan too many.

"Councilman McDowell?" Eve looked both shocked and nauseous. "I don't think so!"

Lolique waved away her protest. "I don't even care."

"Here," Eve said, "you want it?" She started to shed the sweater, but I kicked her, because now I really wanted to try and get a visual from it. Why would McDowell's sweater be at Vinney Carnevale's house on the night Vinney robbed my shop?

"You keep it," Lolique said. "He's been bellyachin' about losin' it for days. He loves the d.a.m.ned thing because she gave it to him. He only wears it in his sanctum sancto rum, anyway. That means his office. Now I'll get some kicks knowing where it is while I'm forced to listen to him whine."

"You don't seriously think your husband and I . . . ?" Eve sipped her beer, because she couldn't finish her sentence.

Lolique chuckled. "Honey, I'd sell you the schlub if I could keep his money and get away with it."

"I. Don't. Want. Him," Eve said. "Never did. Never would."

Lolique looked puzzled. Bad for wrinkles. "Who is your boyfriend?"

Eve hesitated. "Vinney Carnevale."

Lolique slapped the table. "You are so screwed." She chuckled. "I didn't know," she said. "I did not know." She got up fast and without grace. "Potty break or I'll pee my pants."

The flamboyant columnist waved to her adoring public as she crossed the bar. I turned to Eve. "You and the councilman?"

She returned my skepticism. "You and Jaconetti?"

"Seriously," I said. "Is she trying to pin the fire on McDowell?"

"She seriously is, but what did she mean by saying I was screwed? For dating Vinney? I figured that out, but she meant something entirely different, in a nasty way. Mad, why did we find the councilman's sweater at Vinney's the night of the fires? What can that mean?"

"That means," I said, "I can't wait to get my hands on it to see if Sampson's death was in any way connected to . . . Gwendolyn's."

Eve frowned. "Who the h.e.l.l is Gwendolyn?"

Thirty-two.

The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.

-DIANA VREELAND "I suspect that Isobel is Gwendolyn," I whispered. "Shh. Here comes trouble with a capital L."

After a few more Manhattans, Lolique listed like a sail-boat in a high wind, and though she wanted to drive her Beemer when we left, I took her keys from her. "We're taking you home. No arguments."

"Where to?" Eve asked.

"To my castle, Jeeves," the six-foot s.e.xpot said as we folded her into Eve's little sports car.

"The name is Eve and where may we find your castle?"

Lolique ticked off a set of convoluted and confusing twists and turns. "If you drive off a cliff into Mystic River," she said when she finished, "you've gone too far."

"Great," Eve mumbled as she started her car. "Directions from an inebriated bimbette."

"I wasn't with the Bimbettes, I was one of the Florettes, a troupe of world-cla.s.s exotic dancers. That's where I got my stage name, LaFleur-that's French for the flower. And that's where the old goat rescued me. He said I made him laugh, so he pried me off my pole and carried me to his castle, like a rich prince in an antique Jag. Then he took off his hair. Rude awakening."

I snorted.

Eve grinned, reached over, and gave me a playful shove.

As we drove through the farthest reaches of the Mystick Falls woods, Lolique was lying on the tiny backseat of Eve's Mini Cooper, her legs in the air, walking her spikes across Eve's closed convertible top.

Eve looked in her rearview mirror. "You put a hole in my roof, you'll pay for it."

"I can afford it. I'm rich!"

Lolique said the word "rich" the way Tony the Tiger says "great." But it was obvious that flaunting her money was part of her celebrity persona. Still, you'd think she'd be herself once in a while. Though she did say that she was "what you see is what you get."

After an aborted rendition of "We're in the Money," she laughed. "We've got his money, and her money, even her father's money."

"Who is the her, in 'her money'?" I asked.

"Saint Belle, the perfect."

Belle? Isobel? I turned in my seat to look back at Lolique. "I thought your husband's first wife was named Gwendolyn?"

"Gwen-do-lyn," Lolique said with snark, like the drunk she was. "No wonder she hated her first name."

My heart raced to the point that I had to hold my chest to keep it in there. Gwendolyn Isobel. G. I., the first two initials in the ring. Except that Lolique had said Belle, not Isobel.

Heck, I thought I might have spoken the name of the person whose dresses were cut into quilt squares. Isobel could have been Belle's mother for all I knew. True, the man the woman spoke to in my vision had hair, which time could surely erase, but he'd seemed to dislike the woman so much, he'd never call her a saint.

According to the portrait at the dealership, the ring definitely belonged to McDowell's wife, and since I found the ring in the quilt, that could have been the quilt that Gwendolyn Isobel and the man whose face I never saw were talking about. But the bones, who knew?

"Lolique, were those her clothes you gave me? Isobel's, I mean?"

"Screw the goat!" Lolique said with a military raise of her fist. "He wanted them locked in the attic forever, but I picked the lock on the wardrobe and gave them to you. Expensive. Couldn't bring myself to . . . burn-"

Silence.

"Did she pa.s.s out in the middle of a sentence?" Eve asked.

I looked in the back. "Yep."

"With her legs in the air?"

That turned my attention. We burst into stifled laughter.

"Stop it," she said, "or I'll have to-"

"Pee your pants?" That was a long-standing joke of ours. I'd done exactly that once on Halloween when we'd sneaked out after dark, peeked in a window, and came face-to-face with a witch, Aunt Fiona to be exact.

"No, smarty. Pull over until I can drive again."

"I'll drive," Lolique said, punctuating her offer with a snort and a snore.

Following her pre-coma directions, we found ourselves on a narrowing, sandy lane lined with bushes, ripe with rose hips. "We're lost," Eve said.